Unable to see glyph outlines in VOLT

[Jimibooks]

As can be seen by my questions, I'm still quite the newbie in VOLT. But have successfully added fairly complex features to one font, for which I'm now trying to create an italic counterpart.

Despite various output/generation options attempted from FLS 5, the TrueType font, on opening in VOLT, will not show any glyph outlines; the glyph names are present, etc., but I literally cannot see the outlines on screen.

I am generating the TT font on FLS 5 Mac; moving it to Windows XP, and then importing. The font (without OpenType features) will install and print just fine under OS X or WinXP, so the outlines are present in the font; and I can see nothing wrong with the font in FLS.

I'm stumped and not sure where to head next. Any ideas?

Jimibooks

[tiro_hudson]

Presuming this is indeed a TrueType (PS OT font glyphs will not display in VOLT), my guess is that this is a device metrics issue. Fonts output from FLS on the Mac almost always have incorrect hdmx, LTSH and VDMX tables, which can cause rasterising problems in some situations.

When you move your font over to Windows, the first thing you should do is run it through the MS Font Validator tool. This will identify errors in the font tables. See
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/validator/default.htm

In order to fix the device metrics tables, you will need to run the cacheTT tool, which is included in the MS command line tool set:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/tools/tools.htm

[In the Windows version of FLS, there is an option for TT fonts that will run cacheTT during font generation.]

[Jimibooks]

Thanks much, John, for this lead. But I'm, so far, not getting to the end of this.

I downloaded the Cachett utililty; created a config file, etc.; and consistently get errors on running Cachett--that is, it doesn't reach completion. The error string is: "cCode = 0x0 Gindex = 0x0 : error 0x111b"  This error is reported whether I use a config file or not and with various options enabled in the config file.

I also tried cleaning out the hdmx list of PPMs in FontLab, so that (theoretically) no hdmx table is created; but still no joy: no outlines show up in VOLT and processing this font file through Cachett generates a different error: "Warning: bit 4 of flags field in 'head' table not set; 'hdmx' table should not be included and will not be set."

I'm about ready to trash the entire font and start from scratch. Any further ideas before I do that?

[tiro_hudson]

You can send me the font, and I'll see if I can fix the problem. I won't share the font with anyone else, and will delete it after I either solve the problem or fail to do so. If you want to do this, please send both the generated font and also the FontLab .vfb file.

You can email me at tiro[at]tiro[dot]com

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